Wong Kar-wai spent years tinkering with The Grandmaster, and when he finally handed it in, he found producer Harvey Weinstein waiting with his blunted and overworked scissors, keen to deliver something ready for global consumption. Wong's biopic of Ip Man, the martial-arts legend who schooled Bruce Lee among others, has been beaten to the punch by a series of films starring Donnie Yen in the lead role - and while you might decry these sight unseen as no more than DTV knock-offs, those genre exercises actually attained a rare grace and poetry: they came to move their viewers, both literally and figuratively. The Grandmaster is a lavish elaboration on the same story: it's both martial-arts cinema deluxe, and - in the 108-minute cut which debuts on DVD next week - more than a little bit faffy.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fight scenes themselves, which repeatedly and obsessively wrap Yuen Wo-ping's choreography in layer upon layer of texture and styling. Wong may be the only director of martial arts to appear less interested in the kicks being landed than the shoes his fighters wear as they land them. (As with In the Mood for Love, Wong's 2000 landmark, The Grandmaster was costumed and edited by the same man, William Chang; it's an example of a film being tailored to accommodate its own fetishes.) The whole film, indeed, is caught up with ideas of style - most specifically, the diverse methods of combat practised by its principal players.

In an early sequence, Ip (Tony Leung) moves from room to room in the brothel he's been obliged to use as his academy, encountering in each a new challenger who sets about him with a recognisably different line of attack. Our man's wing chun - so elevated in those earlier Yen films - now starts to seem more meat-and-potatoes, no more than the briskest form of defence; it looks cool, because it apparently involves far less effort, but appears markedly less flamboyant than the fighting of everybody else Ip will find himself up against. There's a historical significance to the moment Wong's film is attempting to describe in such languid detail - it's one where these rival schools found themselves temporarily unified, in the battle against the invading Japanese - although it's been somewhat obscured, if not entirely betrayed, in the Weinstein cut.

Perhaps we shouldn't bemoan the producer's involvement unduly: he's added explanatory title cards and identifying labels for key characters, which occasionally help the narrative snap into focus. It's also hard not to feel Weinstein had his work cut out for him the minute he took delivery of the print. The film as it stands is full of set-ups that peter out, threads that cannot be reattached: a tussle over succession, the brooding Ma Sen (Zhang Jin), an on-off quasi-romance with the wilful Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). Wong sometimes appears as distractible as that genre warhorse Johnnie To, becoming bored with even his better ideas: how these characters link up isn't always clear, and they generally seem more preoccupied with their position in time than the film is. Ip spends this cut's second half off-screen, at which point the film threatens to become all gravy, no meat-and-potatoes.What's frustrating is that even the free-floating scenes are tremendous: one extended dust-up on a snowy platform between Gong and Ma, the characters leaping out of and disappearing into the vast plumes of white smoke left behind by departing steam trains, suggests what might have happened if the Shaw brothers had turned their flying fists to adapting Anna Karenina. The whole project winds up in this way, both mesmerising and makeshift: a glimpse of an incredibly designed warrior costume that dazzles the eye - until you notice the sticky tape and string holding it all together, and the gaping holes that would render it something of a liability on the battlefield.

The Grandmaster is available on DVD and Blu-Ray through Metrodome from Monday.

Director Jon Wright
here follows his enjoyable Irish monster movie Grabbers with what resembles a Children’s Film Foundation offering
updated for the JJ Abrams era: we now get substantially better VFX, lashings of
lens flare, and Roy Hudd as a kindly grandpa. The battlelines between the
robots oppressing a Manx backwater and schoolmarm Gillian Anderson’s rebellious
charges are economically established; only during the second-act runaround does
it start to seem a little underpowered when set against its American
competition. Still, it’s brisk enough, and Wright’s fondness for types sustains
it: there are well-judged contributions from Ben Kingsley as a snippy
collaborator and Tamer Hassan as the guvnor of a pub operating on permanent
lockdown. Never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and non-conformist
than the Transformers movies that
have occupied multiplexes of late: the strategic deployment of a WW2 Spitfire
suggests it may hold symbolic value for our newly confident industry.

Every now and again,
Hollywood relocates key talent to the wilds for the express purpose of spunking
millions of dollars over a cliff. Here’s one such occasion: a 3D mock-epic in
which beard-and-scenery-chewing witchhunter Jeff Bridges mentors third-choice
chosen one Ben Barnes to slay shapeshifting dragon lady Julianne Moore.
Director Sergei Bodrov opts for mindless overkill, stocking every Dante
Ferretti-designed set with kung fu Tartars and vengeful Vishnus, and hoping
we’ll be too psyched or numbed to notice the dubious
white-blando-puts-minorities-to-the-sword subtext. It’s lively-daft, but you do
find yourself wondering: all this expertise, and the best anybody could think
to do with it was this?

Vengeance has powered countless movies over the
years, but rarely can it have been given such a thorough – and thoroughly
entertaining – showcase as it gets in Wild Tales, Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifron’s Oscar-nominated portmanteau of tales from the dark side of human
nature. The agenda is set in a short, sharp prologue, as a mid-air conversation
between a music critic and a model leads to an entire passenger roster
realising they’ve wronged the wrong guy; with the revelation nobody paid for
their own ticket, the stomach promptly plummets several thousand feet. Adopt
the brace position: we’re in for extreme turbulence.

On the ground, a waitress ponders whether to poison
the customer who fleeced her parents, a flash motorist squares up to a
middle-lane hogger, a wedding party unravels into bloody chaos after an
infidelity accusation…: time and again, we’re left watching – sometimes
horrified, most often amused – as people are pushed to the brink and beyond, and
small lapses in self-control change the courses of multiple lives. You can be
driving an Audi 3000 or wearing black tie – in this world, inner beast prowls
dangerously close to civilised surface; when temperatures rise to jungle level,
primal instinct takes over.

Szifron plays Looney Tunes variations on his theme.
Each time, we know our vexed Wile E. Coyotes will pay for their pursuit of
life’s blithe Road Runners, yet we’re never sure just what that payment will
involve. Brained by an anvil? Blown to smithereens? We expect Ricardo Darín, Argentinian cinema’s Rock Steady Eddie, to stay cool, but even his
workaholic engineer – left carless after a parking violation – finds himself
worn down by the city’s byzantine regulations. Occasionally, the eruptions prove
liberating; more commonly, these characters emerge bruised and bedraggled, if
they emerge at all. No-one comes out of it looking good exactly.

Save for one man – Szifron himself, for whom Wild Tales serves as a sharp-edged
calling card: he pulls off intimate, knife-in-the-back character business as
well as blowing stuff up in screenfilling set-pieces. (We see Darin demolishing
cooling towers, but the whole project’s a supremely controlled explosion.) When
the dust settles, you might question what it adds up to: an extended exercise
in schadenfreude, perhaps, or
possibly a valuable reminder, in this increasingly intemperate universe, of the
benefits of keeping your fists in your pockets. Either way, while it’s boiling
over, it’s satisfyingly snippy fun – the movie equivalent of cutting three
inches off a cheating ex’s trousers.

In recent decades, Michael Winterbottom has emerged as among our most
prolific and contradictory filmmakers. We know he’s drawn
towards the pure sensation expressed in, say, 9 Songs (sex) and 24 Hour Party People (drugs, rock ‘n’ roll). At the same time, he’s
prone to putting distancing layers between his characters and us; he may be British cinema’s pre-eminent postmodernist, as hard to pin down as the films
themselves. His latest The Face of an
Angel proves
typically confounding: first announced as Winterbottom’s take
on the Meredith Kercher case, it finally emerges as a film about a film
about a vaguely familiar overseas
murder.

Within this hall of mirrors, we catch glimpses of a glowing autoportrait in the questing form of Daniel Brühl’s Teutonically sincere director Thomas Lang, irresistible to hardened
journo Kate Beckinsale and footloose student Cara Delevingne alike. The throughline in Paul
Viragh’s script is Lang’s growing alienation from the hacks and
bloggers gathering in Siena for the verdict: pointedly less heroic than the newsmen of Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, these vultures hover over the corpse,
and obsess about the
accused’s wardrobe choices. Lang furrows his brow and sheds
actual tears,
but gets no closer to this truth than anybody else.

What’s around him descends into tail-chasing: we get classical references, movie-biz
insider comedy (dimbulb execs suggesting Tina Fey as perfect for
Lang’s project), fantasies, nightmares, screen-test footage of young actresses who’ve
caught either director’s eye – notes for a film, rather than anything so
conventional as a film itself. Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has
long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to
commit to his own better ideas:
here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a
constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.

As the
film-within-the-film stalls in development hell, so too The Face of an Angel turns circles without really getting anywhere, the
work of a filmmaker getting bogged down first in the vagaries of the modern media and the Italian criminal court system, then in his own personal and
professional difficulties. His desire to keep the cameras rolling, and produce something to show for his troubles might have been
honourable or
admirable in other circumstances; here, it just leaves you mildly
troubled that a film that started and ends with the name Meredith
Kercher should have wound up being chiefly about Michael Winterbottom.

Thursday, 26 March 2015

At once a landmark documentary, and a deeply problematic one, Gimme Shelter starts out as a record of the Rolling Stones' 1969 tour of the US - a response, perhaps, to Don't Look Back, Pennebaker's 1967 film of Bob Dylan touring the UK - before pulling back to reveal we're no longer live on stage with Mick and the boys performing "Jumpin' Jack Flash", but mired in the edit suite with the three documentary makers (brothers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin) at the tour's conclusion. The showmen of rock are hereby reduced to the passive position of spectators, looking at monitors and reacting to what's already happened: the fatal stabbing of a fan amid the chaos of Altamont by one of the Hell's Angels recruited as an ad hoc security detail for this concert in particular. It's the moment when this touring lark became much less of a gas, gas, gas; a moment that captures, in a few frames on a Steenbeck, the murderous madness of America as it entered the 1970s.

The central issue of Gimme Shelter is whether allowing the film's subjects into post-production comprises a legitimate tactic or something of a stitch-up on the part of the filmmakers. It's interesting that the Maysles and Zwerin separate out the Stones, presenting the fateful footage to one band member at a time, as though these were criminals being interrogated to see whether their alibis for the night in question matched up. What they - and we - see is, of course, horribly compelling, less a set building towards the big finale than a countdown to a disaster. Showbiz lawyer Melvin Belli bluffs his way through the early venue negotiations; the concert footage comes to resemble the dark side of Woodstock (released the same year, yet unfolding seemingly half a world away). Organised - in the loosest sense of that word - under the credo "let it happen", Altamont was fractious, with acid casualties staging pitched battles both on and off-stage even before Keith Richards struck up the opening chords of "Sympathy for the Devil".

The Maysles/Zwerin team take care to include a good deal of Stones music, perhaps to placate fans, because not even Godard (in 1968's One Plus One) put the band under this level of sustained scrutiny. As it plays out, how much the group were responsible for Altamont remains open to question: certainly Jagger cuts a pitiable figure on stage, suddenly removed of his swagger and murmuring "Sam, we need an ambulance... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." (It is, if nothing else, a potent film about the limitations of rock stars, and the limitations of music to make the world a better place; it tears away several subsequent Band-Aids and confronts us with the ugly wounds no guitar riff can heal.) It shares with Don't Look Back an interest in just what it means to be in the eye of the storm and/or the camera, or in the middle of a crossfire hurricane, but - for all the electrifying content it gathers up and pores over - you do sense a long-disproved equation lurking somewhere behind it all: rock 'n' roll = damaging to our nation's youth. It's a brilliant film, made by squares.

Princess Kaguya’s Oscar nod – in an animation field missing The Lego Movie – actually proves far
less instructive than 2013’s inside-Ghibli doc The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, where a beleaguered Hayao
Miyazaki pushed through The Wind Rises
while stablemate Isao Takahata skulked off-screen, mired in production delays.
The latter’s decade-in-the-planning take on a Japanese folk legend has a
bounteous opening – a woodsman discovers a child in a bamboo shoot, and raises
her as a princess – before a flat midsection that sees Kaguya wait around her
palace for treasure-hunting suitors. Here, Takahata appears to press his own
passivity and indecision onto his character; for a narrative about life’s
transitory nature, it doesn’t half start to drag. Lush, hand-painted images
offer plentiful consolation, but its beauty forms a gilded cage: up until the
undeniably moving final movements, it just feels several shades too constrained
to fully honour its heroine’s restless, questing spirit.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is now screening in selected cinemas, in both dubbed and subtitled prints.

This should have
confirmed Jason Statham’s upward career mobility: it’s fabled screenwriter
William Goldman’s second big-screen pass at his own novel Heat, which sees The Stath, assuming a sometime Burt Reynolds role
as a Vegas gambler who falls foul of the Mob, trading lines (if not blows) with
a half-dozen or so legit performers. It emerges, alas, as a compromise, hedging
its bets between cheery, characterful Ocean’s-ish
caper and brute-force beat-‘em-up; we’re offered traces of both, and yet not
enough of either to satisfy. Notable faces (Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander,
Anne Heche) vanish without trace, and Our Jase struggles with Goldman’s
distinctly American, hard-boiled dialogue. Pity.

Disney’s Big Hero 6 may have
pipped DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2 at this year’s Oscars, yet the latter studio has arguably
displayed greater consistency of late, smart gagwriting buoying even their
holiday filler (Mr. Peabody & Sherman,
Penguins of Madagascar) above a
rising tide of 3D product. What, then, happened with new release Home? It has a fun-sounding premise (an
alien invasion of Earth), and a veteran director in Tim Johnson (Antz, Over the Hedge), and still makes for a most underwhelming matinee.
Perhaps everyone was saving themselves for the forthcoming Minions; savvier parents may consider doing likewise.

Its single best joke flies by early, with the revelation that Oh (voiced
by The Big Bang Theory’sJim Parsons), head coward of
chameleonic aliens the Boov, is so named for the disappointed reaction his
presence engenders. There’s a zappiness about the invasion itself, which
relocates humanity to massive ballpools in Australia: the kind of subjugation
any fan of sun and fun might abide. It’s Oh who spoils the party, CC-ing a
birthday evite to the entire galaxy, and thereby alerting the Boov’s mortal
enemies to their whereabouts; subsequently exiled, he encounters the one human
left behind – Tip (Rihanna), a young Barbadian seeking her mom.

Tip’s quest is template, and not invulnerable to sentiment; where the Penguins spin-off pursued big, stupid
bellylaughs, Home is clearly aiming
for U-rated cute. Yet it never gets its lines of approach right. The
characterisation’s slightly off, for one: with his cinnamon-bun ears and
wheedling voice, the shapeshifting Oh’s a cross between Lena Dunham and Jar Jar
Binks – an acquired taste, to say the least. And while Tip provides another
step forward for onscreen representation, bum-flashing popstrel Rihanna makes a curious choice as
innocent; she has, however, tossed several filler songs into those montages by
which Johnson strives to plug the copious narrative gaps.

The animators keep it busy and colourful without ever seducing the eye:
even a set-piece involving an inverted Eiffel Tower passes without generating a
truly memorable image. Mostly, Home
resembles that standardised fodder now routinely pitched at easily distracted
youngsters: all but indistinguishable from the already bargain-binned Planet 51 and Escape from Planet Earth, it shrivels when set against DreamWorks’
own Monsters vs. Aliens from 2009.
Animation has become a crowded field, and perhaps we shouldn’t always expect
something out of this world, but this underdeveloped offering barely lifts
itself off the drawing board. It’s very, very… oh.

The pairing of director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas
Jensen have formed an arthouse mainstay for over a decade, but their run may be
nearing an end: taking a break from their usual brooding melodramas resulted in
2012’s sunnily insubstantial Love is All You Need, while Bier crashed flying solo over Hollywood with last year’s
ill-fated Serena. At their best – in
2002’s Open Hearts, say – the
Bier-Jensen films display a heightened sensitivity to the myriad ways modern
lives intersect. At their worst, they can seem like everything Bier’s fellow
Dane Lars von Trier mocks them for: penny-dreadful scenarios presenting ludicrous
contrivances in the beigest manner imaginable.

Their latest A Second Chance
means to signify a creative rebirth – babies feature prominently – yet it
founders in negotiating a meeting of two very diverse households. Here, the
council flat of junkies Tristan and Sanne (Nikolaj Lie Kaas and May Andersen),
shooting up before their faeces-smeared infant; there, the fairylit rural idyll
in which conscientious cop Andreas and wife Anna (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and
Maria Bonnevie) are raising their own newborn. Worlds collide via a naggingly
unpersuasive switcheroo: when the prince’s son expires one night, he elects to
disregard official procedure and swap with the pauper. What, possibly, could go
wrong?

As elsewhere in the Bier canon, raw-nerve acting helps sustain the
dramatic high-wire act for a while: we’re so struck by the emotions playing
across these actors’ faces that we don’t notice their stumbling feet. There’s
something compelling in Bonnevie’s grief at being deprived of the last item of
soft furnishing required to complete her ideal home; likewise, in watching Coster-Waldau
– nowadays most often cast as stock-Hollywood handsome (Game of Thrones) – feeling his granite-hewn jawline subside under
the strain of maintaining this equilibrium. Yet that strain increasingly owes
less to reality than Jensen’s flagrant manipulation.

If this were black comedy – with Andreas established as an obvious loose
cannon – we’d maybe play along, but Bier’s reaching for sincerity: the sketchy
rationale offered for the cop’s actions is the soapy-romantic one that he’s
trying to spare his beloved from self-sacrifice – a line that threatens to make
patsies out of everyone, including the audience. Some of the ambience sticks –
a lake laps ominously at a twilit shore – and does nothing to diminish Bier’s
reputation as among our most sensitive storytellers. Yet this tale, more
mechanical than human, is finally beyond her skillset: it required ruthless
tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.

This will be a big year for the wispier of our two Tom Hardys. An
all-new Far From the Madding Crowd,
directed by Dogme graduate Thomas Vinterberg and starring Carey Mulligan –
calls upon us in May; by way of a refresher – or spoiler – this week sees MGM’s
1967 adaptation reissued in a new print. Back then, some observers saw John
Schlesinger’s film, emerging in the year of Bonnie
and Clyde and Godard’s Week-End,
amid growing discontent on the streets of Europe, as further proof of British
cinema’s tendency to retreat under layers of period clothing at times of social
unrest. Once again, they said, we were operating in our own picturesque little
world.

Still, how picturesque – and what a world. From the opening 360-degree
pan over a desolate hillside, cinematographer Nic Roeg – that pre-eminent movie
alchemist, yet to go Walkabout –
transforms Hardy’s Wessex into a landscape both tangible and mystical, its
vistas encompassing both abject desolation (shepherd Alan Bates watching his
flock plummet over a cliff, a still-staggering image of loss) and stirring
fecundity (Terence Stamp wooing Julie Christie in fields green enough to make
Teletubbyland seem dull). Everything in this extraordinary evocation of island
life is seasonal; these folk, their affections and fortunes, shift with the
winds and tides.

Credit Schlesinger and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, then, for
maintaining such a precise bearing on the personalities that define Hardy’s
central love quadrangle. As Peter Finch’s landowner Boldwood dines alone,
plagued by a ticking clock, you can audibly hear a man moving closer to death –
whether his own, or someone else’s. Stamp proceeds from dashing blade to
dastardly highwayman with a prowling panther’s grace, while contemporary
filmmakers would surely make disastrous attempts to punch up Gabriel Oak’s
quiet decency: Schlesinger wisely allowed Bates to take root in the background,
projecting an appreciable sturdiness.

It’s typical of the film’s radical resistance to the swoony melodrama
governing previous literary adaptations: Schlesinger grounds everybody in the
mud, such that Christie’s increasingly self-reliant Bathsheba now seems a very
modern gal, no more fool or victim than any of the men swarming about her. If
it’s a little boxy – though never as chocolate-boxy as, say, Doctor Zhivago – its themes, images and
ideas continue to be unpacked by today’s period directors, and this restoration
permits their organic beauty to live and breathe anew. The Vinterberg variation
will be going some to be as hardy – or, indeed, as thoroughly, richly Hardy –
as this perennial.

Liam Neeson’s Global
Punching Roadshow rolls on. This New York layover – overseen by Non-Stop’s Jaume Collet-Serra – improves
upon the star’s recent engagements: unlike the Taken sequels, it’s never caught cutting around the asswhupping
you’ve paid to see, and it grounds all its beatdowns in appreciably supple
character business. While doing a dusk-till-dawn shepherding job on an
estranged son (Joel Kinnaman) who’s witnessed a Mob hit, Neeson’s boozy,
washed-up former hitman faces off at regular intervals against heavyweight
thesps (Ed Harris, Vincent d’Onofrio, Nick Nolte) who actually appear up for
earning their paycheques. Swooping CG scene transitions add a needless touch of
Google Maps-era flash to fundamentally retro material, but Collet-Serra stages
pulse-elevating car chases and bar brawls, and weaves in pleasing,
connoisseurial local detail: a simultaneous ice-hockey derby provides Big Liam
with one ingenious avenue of escape, while the Irish-American Christmas setting
pays off with a taproom shootout scored to “Fairytale of New York”.

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:1. The Fugitive (Monday, five, 11pm)2. In Which We Serve (Saturday, BBC2, 1.10pm)3. Play Misty for Me (Saturday, ITV1, 11.15pm)4. Good Vibrations (Saturday, BBC2, 10.30pm)5. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (Sunday, five, 11.15pm)

About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).